CrossOver Support - Community Forums

By installing too many games? I don't mean numbers of games, I mean when I get a new game, I always try Crossover Games first, then move to other options if it doesn't work. I assume that the things that those games installed are still hanging around cluttering up the install, possibly causing confusion for other games?

Here's why I think this might be an issue and what I did. I used to have a C2D iMac, which I passed on to my son, who is using Crossover Games on his account, which is a fresh install with only 4 games installed. We were going to play Titan Quest together over LAN. I tried to get the (LAN or internet) game started from my machine, an i7 iMac, and it would crash. Go upstairs and start it (only tried internet, not LAN on his machine) on his, and it works fine. (There was another issue, I was able to use the keyboard to create a player via my machine, but only on regular TQ, not Immortal Throne, and it had other weird keystroke issues, but...)

I tried to get it to start via Parallels and the same thing, the game would crash. Looking around, my Programs menu in Crossover was littered with GFWL, Physics engines, sound engines, etc, so I decided I'd wipe everything that wasn't Mac off this machine and start over. I am still downloading things, and it may have been a stupid thing to do, but I got hit by a truck last year, I've got time :)

My question is was my line of thinking correct? I should be able to at least verify my question once these things re-install, but is there an easier way to do this? As far as the game installs, I had just re-downloaded both TQ and the expansion, Immortal Throne 2 days ago to get ready to play with him, so I'm confident the game install was fine, I could play a Single Player game fine.

Well, I don't really know, but I guess the answer is "yes", and that's why one should install each game to its own bottle. Yes, I have e.g. steam installed in more than 10 bottles, and in each bottle only one game per steam installation. Easy to uninstall (just delete the corresponding bottle), and configuration tricks and gludges and stuff don't interfere with other bottles (like registry settings). That said, you need to wait for more authorative response from someone else 😉

I actually just got done re-installing my core games into a new bottle, and new my Titan Quest install is working as it should, just like my old C2D is.

Adding new games to a new bottle is a great idea and something I plan to do from now on, if it messes up I'll at least know who the culprit is.

Is there a possibility of implementing a snapshot type feature to Crossover in the future where you could revert to an old install? I have a bad feeling that some games I have rated poorly or worse may have gotten a bad rap, I might need to try some again!

Sterling Peoples wrote:

Is there a possibility of implementing a snapshot type feature to
Crossover...

You can achieve this very easily using the archive feature (under manage bottles-> advanced tab)... just create an archive of the bottle right before you make any change you think will disrupt your environment. I use this all the time when testing new builds or adding something (like an game update/patch) to an existing bottle with hopes to fix an issue. It's a full archive so it can chew up space very fast, so you want to get rid of archives you don't need anymore.

Nice, I was going to try a new game here in a bit, and that sounds a bit easier than the new bottle method, although both have their place, I suppose.

Sterling Peoples wrote:

Nice, I was going to try a new game here in a bit, and that sounds a
bit easier than the new bottle method, although both have their
place, I suppose.

I would still recommend considering a new bottle for each game... patches/software/tweaks that will fix one game will and does break other games. The over-head of having 10 bottles vs 1 bottle with 10 apps is usually minor (500MB-3GB of duplicate files) given modern hard-drives and the advantages far out weigh the extra used disk space. But sometimes you do get extra benefits of sharing a bottle... so it's more of a guide-line not a rule.

I'll do that, at least I'll have a way to have an educated guess at what went wrong. I have a 1TB drive onboard and a Drobo with 4-1TB drives, so space isn't an issue.

Next question, while it is archiving, I assume I should not do anything else, such as play a game while that is working? I don't mean install anything, but I figure at most the save file would change during an archive?

Yeah, I don't know if it would be a good idea to use a bottle you are trying to archive... the archive process as best I can tell a fancy gzip'd tar. And would cause errors with the tar process if something in the bottle changed which may cause the archive process to error out.